


The Memory of My Memory is My Friend

by Sachete



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubbles, Fluff, M/M, Meteorstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 06:02:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5573554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sachete/pseuds/Sachete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We find out how to make the memories backdrops instead of interruptions. We meet there and talk about stuff. Yanno. Things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Memory of My Memory is My Friend

We meet in the bubbles. Not often. I like my sleep. Karkat’s naps are few and far between. When he does catch some shuteye, he’s there with me. We wind up in the same bubbles and share memories from distant years and dead worlds. I remember Austin. I remember my apartment and the hot pavement and the municipal pool full of algae and gunk that I swam in anyway. Karkat remembers twilit works of child-designed architecture and playing games with his friends and taking care of his weird guardian thing.

I fall asleep after him, this time, and find him, as I always do, but not by searching. It just happens this way. He’s remembering his room full of movie posters and electronics. It’s dark. The memory is contained to this room, fleshing out every little detail. There’s a pile of dirty laundry in the corner. On the desk is a wrinkled piece of paper with writing on it in Alternian, and I can’t understand it, but I’m sure it’s accurate. I’m sure Karkat remembers what it said. This is how he left it.

“We must stop meeting like this, Mister Vantas. Our companions will suspect a scandal.”

“Suspicion isn’t necessary when the whole meteor knows, Dave.” His concentration breaks. The room and memory dissolves. I wonder if it was a good one. “And there’s nothing scandalous about us.”

He replaces his room with mine--not my room on the meteor, but my room back in Austin, based on the times he’s seen those memories. He does an all right job recreating it, but the animals in the jars are mangled, the brand on my turntables is written in Alternian, and those particular pictures weren’t hanging when I left. I don’t fix it, though. I don’t fix the memory of my memory.

“Clandestine lovers, separate in life, but together in dreams.”

“Shut it.”

“You must admit, dear Karkat, that this is romantic in all the right ways.”

“More like all the wrong ways.”

“So you admit it’s a scandal! Oh, if only I hadn’t known! If only you hadn’t told me! I fear I may faint. I should lie down.” I actually do. I crawl next to Karkat on the floor and lie on my stomach and use his thigh for a pillow. He remembered my bed, but he was already on the floor. “Seriously, though. It is a little bit, isn’t it.”

“A little what?”

“Scandalous. Taboo. Kinky.” I look up at him and waggle my eyebrows. He moves his leg a little to give a halfhearted shove. I turn back over. “Like, you have your quadrants, but none of them are filled, right?”

He hums and puts a hand in my hair. “I have you.”

“I don’t count. For the sake of your romance, I don’t count. We’re not like that. At least, I don’t think we are.”

“No, we’re not.” Karkat tugs at a knot in my hair and glances at the turntables as if noticing something off but being unable to place what. “We’re not like that.”

“And that’s wrong?”

“Yes.” His hand stills in my hair. “No? Not anymore, I guess. But the others don’t understand it.”

“And you do?”

“I feel it,” he says. No hesitation. “I just… I know it. I know I love you.” My heart doesn’t stir, no, of course not, but he might be able to feel the heat in my face through the fabric of his jeans. “That’s true, no matter the quadrant. You irritate me all the fucking time, and ever since Gamzee went batshit, you talk to me. I talk to you. We sit in piles together and have feelings all over each other in the palest and most platonic way imaginable, but we also… Uh, also, we–”

“Fuck a lot?” I finish for him, glancing up to check out his face. He’s got his eyebrows furrowed. I grin against his skin. “God, I love it when you fuck me, Karkat. Just thought I should get that out there. Cuz I do. I love the way you move inside me and hold me all tight and close and bite my neck and–”

“Okay, yes, yes, thank you for that information.” Aw, he’s all red in the face. His fingers have tightened around a lock of hair, accidentally pulling, but I don’t let him know. “Do we even need an auspistice? This is what I’m talking about. That statement upset me, but I’m still flushed for you in the background. I know it. It’s not vacillation. It’s simultaneous.”

“Dude, that’s what love is like.”

“Not for Trolls.”  
  
“Well, maybe it should be.”

“No, it shouldn’t. The very propagation of my species depends on my ability to feel these separate things for separate people. You’re not right for me, Strider. You’re not supposed to be everything at once. I’m supposed to have different people for all this stuff.”

I let that sink in. The photos hanging above flutter in a dying breeze. “Are you breaking up with me or something?”

“What? No. I’m saying you’re right. I’m saying this is wrong on so many levels. We’re wrong on so many levels and it’s infuriating but–”

“Oh god, you’re breaking up with me–”

“–But, I don’t care.” He takes his hand from my hair and runs it through his own. Exasperation. “I don’t care. Fuck it. I don’t give a shit. About the others and what they think is right. Fuck em. If they need a bunch of different people to be happy, then that’s fine. But I just. I guess I don’t need anyone else. I don’t want anyone else.”

I’m quiet for a moment while my heart does its weird flipping thing. “I’m tearing up over here, Kar.” I get a smack in the head for that. Seriously this time: “Thanks for telling me this, bro.”

“Whatever.”

“I mean it. Cultural norms are hard to defy, even after all civilization comes crumbling around you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s about time I accepted that I was never gonna have a normal relationship with anyone, anyway. Defying cultural norms is kind of my thing just by existing, even when everything was un-crumbled.”

“Man, I hear ya. Fight the power. _Fight the war; fuck the norm!_ ” I’m trying to get him to smile with lyrics from a band whose entire cause was anarchy, and isn’t that what we have now? There’s no system, no culture, no easily enforced laws or rules, except of Time and Space. There are always rules for those.

“At least now we have a chance,” he says. “We can change things, and things that don’t matter won’t.” He’s still staring at the turntables. I give in and fix the memory for him.

“We’ll do it, bro.” I pat him on the leg. He puts his hand back in my hair, and it’s lighter, somehow. Not as real. And I remember he’s a light sleeper, and he fell asleep first anyway. “We’ll do it together.”

The hand in my hair disappears, and so does the thigh I was leaning on, and my head falls to the floor with a thunk! I’m left alone in his memory of my memory of my room.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my [Tumblr.](http://sachete.tumblr.com)


End file.
